New Installments in Introduction to Mozilla Firebird Series Explain Bookmarks and Flash

Monday November 24th, 2003

Morten W. Petersen writes: "Kay Frode has written two new articles on Firebird, covering bookmarks and how to install the Flash Player. Any comments? Enjoy."

#1 "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by MTO

Monday November 24th, 2003 8:28 PM

The existence of a tutorial on how to install the flash player only comes to show how much flash is needed to come included in the Mozilla application installation. People really expect to be able to user normally their browsers once installed, IE does that, Netscape used to do that, why wont Mozilla?

The text the article starts with sums it all: "Most of you who have used Firebird would notice certain things you can't see when using Firebird. This is due to the lack of flash player." Notice the text "most of you".

Anyway, good article. It might help to provide a link to the Macromedia Flash Player download page. ;)

#4 Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by Simplex

Monday November 24th, 2003 10:18 PM

From: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/roadmap.html

Mozilla Firebird Version 0.9 - Default Extension Bundles

#7 Re: Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by mlefevre

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 2:38 AM

Er... that's about extensions, not plugins.

I don't know if distributing Flash and stuff has been looked into, but it really depends on Macromedia and the other companies that make the plugins. They don't allow unlimited distribution, so Mozilla would have to make a special agreement with them, and Mozilla would then have to control how the builds including the plugins were redistributed.

#8 Re: Re: Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by fgsouza

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 2:52 AM

Flash is a necessity! If a new user is trying Firebird and it get that page with "get the plug-in" it will just close firebird and return to IE. If the end-user is to became the target to Mozilla Organization, this is a priority. IE is always the comparasion standard, so do what IE do at least. The remaining goodness and best implementation will retain the user. My god, not all users are geeks! And remember that IE with its monopoly has that very easy plugin install, just hit a "yes". Now thar Mozilla is a organization it should reach a agreement with Macromedia over this distribution issue. Macromedia wants flash everywhere, so that dont should be very difficult to come by.

#13 Re: Re: Re: Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by dgblzzblue

Thursday November 27th, 2003 3:39 PM

I have Mozilla 1.5 on a red hat 9.0 OS. I used to have a double boot system with windows but have recently trashed the windows partition and now run a total linux laptop.When I installed firebird.Flash automatically installed and that was the end of it. Nothing beats a true Linux OS. You do not need windows.Everything I need is available for free in the Linux community.For DVD I use Zine For every office app I use Open Office 1.1.For Email and Calender I use Ximian 1.4. The OS did a plug and play with both the Camera (Canon S300 and the PCMCIA card for Charter Cable).

#9 Re: Re: Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by Simplex

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 10:54 AM

I was just saying don't complain about what is packaged with the install until 0.9 comes out. By then, the installer will be available (and working well) and it might have checkboxes to download and install things like flash.

You should just wait to complain until after that step has been reached.

#10 Re: Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by jesse

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 1:08 PM

"Ship Default Plugins" ( http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224227 ) is targeted for 1.0.

#11 Re: "Most of you..." -> Exactly!

by alanjstr

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 5:30 PM

Last I heard, they would have to strike a licensing agreement with Macromedia in order to bundle it. That's why Mozilla never shipped them but Netscape did.

#2 Oddly

by bmacfarland

Monday November 24th, 2003 8:54 PM

When i tried to install Flash the other day it wouldn't recognize Firebird as a browser on my system. It wanted to install it on all my other browsers.

#5 Re: Oddly

by Simplex

Monday November 24th, 2003 10:21 PM

From: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/phoenixwin.html (they should change the URL)

Did you use the [Unofficial] Mozilla Firebird Installer (http://seb.mozdev.org/firebird/)? If you didn't, you need to add some information to the system registry. If you did use the installer, you can skip this, as the installer does it for you. If you unzipped Mozilla Firebird in C:\Program Files\MozillaFirebird, just download this registry file (http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/resources/firebird.reg) (alt-click to save) and apply it. If you unzipped to somewhere other than C:\Program Files\MozillaFirebird, full instructions are here (http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/phoenix.html).

#3 Never finds Fb

by leet

Monday November 24th, 2003 8:56 PM

It should talk about how Flash often doesn't find the Mozilla browsers, and you'll need to manually pick the plugin folder for its installer. At least that's been my experience.

And oh yeah, bundle it already. Most people won't bother with plugin installs and just blame the browser.

#6 Re: Never finds Fb

by Simplex

Monday November 24th, 2003 10:22 PM

See my comment above.

#12 In addition

by kepardue

Thursday November 27th, 2003 7:18 AM

One other thing that would be great to ship by default would be the Mozilla Active X Control. That way people could easily use the Windows Media Player plugin the way Netscape did in the end.